10.28.05

Though they managed to issue credentials to that great baseball legend Steve Perry, the White Sox came up a little short with one of their all-time greats Wednesday night. From the Chicago Tribune’s Fred Mitchell (thanks to Jay Strell for the link) :

On a night when Major League Baseball announced its all-time Latino Legends team, longtime White Sox star Minnie Minoso was denied admittance to the team’s locker room Wednesday to join in the World Series celebration at Minute Maid Park.

“They won’t let me in; they say they don’t know who I am,” an exasperated Minoso told this reporter as credentialed media, players’ wives, children and various peripheral members of the White Sox organization and MLB paraded in and around the champagne-soaked clubhouse.

Minoso, 82, a Cuban-born star who spent 12 of his 17 major-league seasons with the White Sox, has a statue of his likeness at U.S. Cellular Field. Earlier this year, the statue inadvertently was damaged by a fan. Wednesday night, Minoso went searching frantically for White Sox authorities to help him gain admittance to the clubhouse or the area just outside the locker room, but he was not made to feel like a celebrity by MLB security.